Thermal monitoring of solidification in molded casting of drone landing leg

This paper presents the design, fabrication, and thermal characterization of an acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) mold produced by fused deposition modeling (FDM) extrusion-based additive manufacturing used for the wax casting of a drone landing leg. A thermal monitoring framework, consisting of four K-type thermocouples logged at 1 s intervals, was deployed across six casting trials to capture the complete solidification cycle, yielding 84,717 time-stamped measurements. The study focuses on thermal data analysis and materials science interpretation through descriptive statistics, normality diagnostics, inter-trial Kruskal–Wallis tests, phase-duration analysis, rolling-variance monitoring, and inter-channel Pearson correlation. Key findings include a persistent spatial temperature hierarchy among the four sensor channels (CH2 > CH1 > CH4 > CH3) with temperature differences of 6–8 $$ ^{\\circ }\\text {C}$$ across all trials, a propagation delay of up to 3.2 min between the first-contact and thermally inertial sensor locations, non-Gaussian right-skewed temperature distributions in every channel (consistent with Newtonian cooling), and statistically significant inter-trial variability ( $$H_{\\textrm{CH3}} = 3{,}190$$ , $$p < 0.0001$$ ), driven primarily by pour temperature differences. The rolling 60 s standard deviation is identified as the most effective real-time indicator for monitoring the solidification process in this geometry. The results are discussed in the context of soy wax solidification physics, the thermal resistance of the ABS mold, and their implications for future aluminum casting applications.